The Memory Tree

by Tess Evans

  He retched. ‘Are you okay, Zav?’ A female voice, tentative, on the other side of the door.

  Sealie. ‘I’m fine. Go away.’

  ‘I’ve left some clean clothes for you—just here, outside the bathroom.’

  Zav completed his shave and only then looked at his face properly. Without the heavy growth it looked thinner, was thinner. His dark hair, with its short, army haircut, was stuck to his scalp. He could actually see the dust. His mouth was grim, with newly etched trenches from nose to chin. The skin around his eyes was stretched and bruised. He met his own gaze and looked away quickly. He was nowhere near ready for that.

  He spent a long time in the shower, relishing the dense, cool spray and sweet-smelling soap until he had washed away all the dust and mud and sweat he had brought back with him. Drying himself with thick, soft towels, he was surprised to find that he didn’t break into an immediate sweat. In Vietnam he was never totally dry. He took longer than necessary to dress, dreading the violence of grief beyond the door. Shamed that he couldn’t offer to mingle his own.

  Zav sat on the edge of the bath and slowly buttoned his shirt. His father had killed his baby girl. His daughter was lost to him forever. Where was the horror, the revulsion, the gut-wrenching pain he knew he should be feeling? He sensed its presence but access was denied. He had simply run out of space for any more horror or pity. His head was crowded with images of war and this tragedy of peace was too fragile to fight its way to the surface. Better she never lived than to know what I know, Zav thought. But he knew that was unnatural. One day I’ll have the space to mourn, he promised me softly.

  While tears of grief were beyond him, anger flourished. He strode around the house muttering curses and shouting diatribes against his father. Kate, too, hated Hal, but her focus was on her child. She tried to teach Zav about the daughter he had known so briefly.

  ‘Come and sit down,’ she implored the pacing Zav. ‘I want to show you the photos.’ She took out an envelope and touched each one gently before passing it into her husband’s reluctant hands. He held them limply as though they were someone else’s tedious holiday snaps. His eyes refused to focus.

  ‘Here she is with the fairy wings Sealie gave her.’

  Zav tried. ‘Look at that. A little fairy.’ Already reaching for the next photo.

  ‘Here she is in her bassinet. There’s teddy.’

  ‘She liked her teddy?’ He knew so little about her. ‘What’s this one?’ Zav held up a photo of Sealie and me with a roughly torn edge.

  ‘Your father was next to Sealie in that one. I tore him off.’ She had done this to all the photos that included Hal. Then cut him into tiny pieces which she burned in the ashtray.

  ‘That murdering bastard. That fucking shit.’ It seemed that the only thing that could ignite Zav’s passion was hatred of his father. It scared Kate. The vein in his temple throbbed and his face turned dark red. She was afraid he might have a stroke. And even more afraid that Hal’s violence might also be latent in his son.

  When the story appeared in the newspapers, Godown went to visit his flock. Despite his own sorrow, he still had a strong sense of duty. Knocking on Jockey’s door he was confronted by a frowsy woman in hair rollers and a floral dressing-gown. ‘He’s gone,’ she responded in answer to his question. ‘Left early this morning. Didn’t want the newspapers nosing round his affairs again.’

  ‘Thank you, ma’am. You don’t happen to know where he went?’

  ‘You tell me. He owes me two weeks’ rent.’

  Godown fished in his wallet for twenty dollars and handed it to the woman who grabbed it eagerly. He squared his shoulders and went next door to Bert and Beryl’s. In contrast to Jockey’s house, theirs was neat as a pin, with carefully pruned roses and a minuscule lawn. ‘Emoh Ruo’, the brass plate announced. The venetian blind twitched and Bert opened the door.

  ‘Sorry, Pastor,’ he said, before Godown could speak. ‘Beryl and me are no longer members of your church.’ And he closed the door without another word. It was the most definitive action Godown had ever witnessed from that timid little man.

  The dry cleaning/electrical repair shop was open when he got there. Helena and Spiros were standing together, right on the border, behind the counter. They looked up from their conversation as Godown came in, their brows heavy with concern. Over the years their black hair had turned a dark grey; Spiros’ springing up in tufts over his ears, while the middle revealed a shiny olive scalp.

  ‘We can’t have you here anymore, my friend,’ Helena said regretfully. ‘It’s not you, you understand.’ She looked at her husband for support.

  ‘It’s the business,’ Spiros explained. ‘We can’t afford to lose customers.’

  ‘I do understand.’ Godown turned to the door. ‘I brought the station wagon. Do you mind if I collect my things?’

  ‘Wait. We owe you some money from the lease.’ Helena began to scrabble in the cash drawer.

  ‘Keep it,’ Godown said wearily. ‘I don’t need it.’

  He walked down the familiar path to his church. Down the familiar path to the shed. He unlocked the door and switched on the light. In the harsh glare of the naked bulb, the corrugated iron walls and the stacked storage boxes were suddenly and painfully visible. In the past, Godown had seen a church, a sacred place made beautiful by its purpose. Now he saw it for what it really was—a cluttered storage shed in an overgrown backyard.

  There was pitifully little to take. He took the box of tea things to the car. Charity shop for those. He gave a wry smile. Beryl was an uncharitable woman but her gift for sponge making was God-given. He returned to the shed and put the few texts, the cross and the hymn sheets in a box. He couldn’t be bothered with the lectern. Finally he took up the small case where he kept his stoles. He remembered Hal’s gleeful anticipation as the parcel was unwrapped, his pride at seeing the pastor wearing his gift while preaching the word of God. What could he do with these? He knew he would never preach again, but felt the need for some symbolic gesture, some final ceremony before the Church of the Divine Conflagration was laid to rest.

  Godown returned to the shop where Helena and Spiros were sitting uneasily on either side of the line.

  ‘I have a gift for you,’ the big man said simply. A stole was draped over his outstretched arms. ‘Green is the colour of hope. I wish you well.’

  They took one end each. ‘Thank you, Pastor.’

  In accord for the first time in years, they watched as Godown left, closing the door carefully behind him.

  ‘That trip back home . . .’ Helena began.

  ‘Could be time.’ Spiros turned the door sign over to ‘Closed’. ‘Let’s have a drink and talk about it.’

  Helena crossed the line, took his hand and they walked together into their home behind the shop.

  Godown’s next stop was the little terrace house. Chloe answered the door and ushered him in to where her sister was waiting.

  ‘I have a gift for you,’ he said. ‘But you must choose.’ He laid out the remaining stoles and stepped back.

  The moment had come to pass.

  Ariadne chose violet, ‘For penance.’

  Chloe chose black, ‘For mourning.’

  Godown was puzzled at their choice, even a little resentful. ‘Surely I’m the one should be mournin’. The one who needs to do penance.’

  ‘You gave us a choice. We have chosen.’

  Godown left with the red and white stoles. The white one he lay on my grave. He kept the red one. Blood and martyrdom. It seemed fitting.

  They had postponed the funeral until my father came home. Dazed and reeling with fatigue, he held my mother close as the Mass of the Angels was celebrated at St Theresa’s. Grief had liquefied her bones. If it were not for my father’s supporting arm, she would have collapsed on the cold terrazzo tiles and evaporated like the quietly dispersing incense. She desired this. The sorrow was too great to bear. Her mother, holding her other arm, grieved not only for her granddaughter, b
ut for her own child, whose pain she felt deep in her womb.

  Sealie sat on the other side of Zav, her face still white with shock. She had been there when they found me, and the police diver, tears and river water streaming down his face, placed me in her appalled arms, where she rocked me and crooned to me in my dreamless sleep. Now there were no tears left to cry, and her mourning was hard and bleak, including as it did, her father, for whom she felt alternately a profound hatred and an even more profound pity. How could she not have known? She had been so eager to go off and start her new life. To leave her father. To allow him to deteriorate unchecked. She knelt and bowed her head so that she would not have to see the little white box.

  ‘Holy Mother Mary, take the hand of our little angel. Keep her safe with you in heaven.’ Mrs Mac prayed for me and then for Hal. ‘Forgive him, Father. He wasn’t himself. He loved little Grace—you know that, Jesus.’

  Godown bowed his head and spoke to the God he had served faithfully most of his life. ‘Accept this spotless lamb who’s comin’ home to you. Take care of her, Lord. And take care of Hal. He was sick and troubled but he sought to serve you well.’

  Bob was used to more formal prayer. ‘Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord . . .’ He suddenly remembered Hal praying that same prayer when Zav was lost on the mountain. ‘It’s you who’s lost now, old mate,’ he murmured, and paused before returning to the austere tolling of the De Profundis.

  Chloe and Ariadne, their eyes brimming with sea-tears, found that words eluded them. So they prayed with their hearts. In the end, there were no words.

  Godown sang.

  In the sweet, bye ’n’ bye

  We will meet on that beautiful shore.

  In the sweet, bye ’n’ bye

  We will meet on that beautiful shore.

  They didn’t sing my song. ‘Amazing Grace’ was forever entwined with Grandfather Hal, my tragic, loving murderer.

  3

  MY GRANDFATHER, FOUND UNFIT TO plead, was detained at the governor’s pleasure.

  Chemically subdued, he sat in the back of a van, between two male nurses, listlessly staring at his hands. Houses and shops flew by unregarded. Farms came and went, their grazing livestock and spring plantings ignored. Mountains loomed in the distance but Hal saw only his hands. Or were they his father’s? They were slightly freckled, he noticed with interest. There were ropey veins and black hairs that trailed from his wrist. He flexed his fingers and spread them wide, frowning absently at the bitten nails.

  As the van continued its journey, he began to doze. His nurses discussed the football, the war, the mystery of the Prime Minister’s disappearance. They wondered idly what it would be like to be a farmer. Decided it was too dependent on the weather. The cloud cover lifted. The ‘Welcome to Ararat’ sign appeared, but Hal was completely unaware of either his companions or the landscape. By the time the van slid to a halt, his head was a vast empty space.

  Someone helped him out and he stood, bewildered, arms hanging by his side. At that moment, he became aware of the Voice. Bide your time, it said softly. Bide your time.

  I will. My grandfather was pathetically grateful to find that he was not abandoned.

  After the presentation of his medical history, Hal was processed and his escort left him with the charge nurse to begin his new life in J-Ward, the secure accommodation for the criminally insane.

  Hal was cold. The small room was unheated, the stone walls obdurate. There were blankets, but he wasn’t allowed pyjamas, so his back and legs felt the chill. In an effort to warm himself, he curled into a foetal position and lay very still. Whenever he disturbed the bedclothes, a wave of cold rippled down his back. There were heaters in the corridor. He’d seen them the night before, but the heat failed to seep through the thick walls. Later, he learned the trick of cocooning himself in his blanket, but for now he longed for his freshly ironed, flannelette pyjamas and his own bed with its soft, warm eiderdown. He missed the morning sun as it filtered through the curtains, spreading a benign light over the ascetic angles of his room. In his mind’s eye he saw it, liquid, like warm golden syrup on dumplings. Mrs Mac made such light dumplings . . . He frowned. Mrs Mac was no longer with him. She had joined the others. Mouth watering, he turned again to the thought of the dumplings and was startled by a loud click. The door opened to reveal a nurse, rubbing his hands against the cold.

  ‘Seven o’clock. Time to get up, Mr Rodriguez.’ The newcomer was a burly man in his mid-forties, with a drooping Zapata moustache and eyebrows that met in the middle. He looks like a South American bandido, Hal thought, dragging his aching body out of bed.

  ‘What do I do now?’ He had to chew each word as he battled to control his thick, spongy tongue.

  ‘You get dressed.’

  Taking the proffered pile of neatly folded clothes, Hal dressed under the watchful eye of the bandido, who seemed to be in a hurry, glancing two or three times at the watch pinned to his uniform. Hal found himself fascinated by the black chest hairs, which emerged like a daddy-long-legs from the neck of the starched, blue shirt. He paused, wondering what he would do if it really were a spider.

  ‘Get a move on.’

  Hal got a move on.

  ‘Out to the exercise yard,’ the nurse said, not unkindly. ‘You’ll get used to the routine.’

  Hal shambled out to a walled courtyard, where men, similarly dressed, were walking alone or in pairs, watched by uniformed nurses. He looked around. There was nothing much to see—surrounding walls, one of which had a wicket painted on it, a basketball ring, and a caged corridor, leading to another building.

  ‘That is the ablutions block,’ volunteered the bandido. ‘You’ll be taken for a shower and shave before breakfast.’

  There was a tree just visible over the wall, and Hal squinted his eyes to see the pattern the leaves made against the milky blue sky. He would have liked to hear them rustle, but couldn’t get close enough. Maybe if he took a running jump . . . No. He had to bide his time. Sort out friend from foe. Meanwhile, he wouldn’t do anything to make them suspicious.

  He stood in the middle of the yard, not sure what to do. It was like his first day at school. He felt as he had then, apprehensive and alone, but when he observed his surroundings closely, they were quite different. For a start there were no females. His little country school yard was populated with both boys and girls, and several mothers, including his own, watched their children with solicitous smiles. The infants’ teacher was a woman, too. Miss Manning, with her fresh, round face and pretty lips, had been Hal’s first love. Later that year, he had fought Billy Tyler over who would marry her but he couldn’t remember who won.

  It was more than the lack of females, Hal thought, leaning against the wall. The schoolyard had been full of noise; the excited chattering of children returning from holidays, the squeaking of the swings, the muted sounds of mothers’ conversations and a magpie song, rising above them all. The exercise yard was so quiet that he could hear his own footfall.

  There was something else. The schoolyard had been full of activity: children running, chasing, showing off new schoolbags, pushing and shoving when the bell rang to call them into line. Here it was curiously still. Inmates walked aimlessly in slow motion or stood sunning themselves against the wall. A few were smoking, the hands holding the cigarettes seeming one with the smoke that drifted desultorily into the air. Sluggish. Everything and everyone was sluggish.

  Only the nurses were alert. The bandido exchanged a few words with his colleagues and hurried away, probably to drag some other poor sod out of bed. One nurse, a tall, lugubrious man with red hair and beard, Hal dubbed Rufus the Red; the other, younger, blond and built like an athlete, Hal decided to call Emil, after Emil Zatopek whom he saw run in the Melbourne Olympics. For the eighteen months Hal was in J-Ward, he never used the nurses’ real names.

  Emil, clipboard in hand, gathered the next group for a shower. There were three of them. The others knew what to do and started to und
ress in the slow, deliberate way of the medicated. Hal felt his spirit shrink as he took in the bleak, grey concrete walls and floor. It was like a bomb shelter, he thought, but who would want to shelter in such a place?

  ‘You too.’ Emil indicated the other patients, then nodded at Hal.

  Hal took off his shirt. ‘Is there a hanger?’

  ‘Put them on the bench.’

  The bench was damp and didn’t look too clean, but Hal did as he was told and the nurse turned on the water, pointing to where he should stand. Hal moved reluctantly. He’d never seen such a dreary place. He’d shared the mateship of the shower in his sports playing days but here he felt raw and exposed. The other two were washing themselves mechanically. At least the water pressure seemed strong. He stepped in gingerly and found himself almost luxuriating in the unexpected warmth of the water. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine he was in his own nicely tiled shower back in Yarra Falls.

  Emil handed him a bar of yellow soap.

  ‘I have sensitive skin,’ Hal told him politely. ‘I’d like my own soap. And shampoo, if you don’t mind.’

  Emil looked at him with something like pity. ‘You should be so lucky. Hurry up now and I’ll give you a shave before breakfast.’

  His beard had been itching and he was grateful for the offer. The young nurse was gentle and Hal’s eyes filled with tears. It seemed so long since he’d experienced the touch of kind hands.

  On his first day, my grandfather had already learned to be grateful for small comforts.

  Breakfast included porridge, eggs, toast and tea. As soon as it was finished and the cutlery counted, the men were returned to the exercise yard, where a few patients began to throw around a basketball. Lunch, more exercise yard, dinner, medication and bed at seven—that completed the monotonous routine.